Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier (23 August 1769-13 May 1832) was a French naturalist and zoologist who became known as the "Father of Paleontology" due to his work in comparing living animals with fossils. Cuvier was a famous opponent of evolution, arguing that cyclical creations and destructions of life forms occurred during global extinction events such as deluges.

Biography
Georges Cuvier was born in Montbeliard, Wurttemberg, Holy Roman Empire in 1769. He excelled in his coursework at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, and he began his work with fossils during the 1790s. In 1796, he began lecturing at the Ecole Centrale du Pantheon, and he began titular professor at the Jardin des Plantes in 1802. In 1806, he became a foreign member of the Royal Society, and he served as an imperial councilor under Napoleon I. A devout Lutheran, he founded the Parisian Bible Society in 1818 and served as Grand Master of the Protestant Faculties of Theology of the French University from 1822 until his death in 1832. Cuvier became the founder of vertebrate paleontology, developed a classification system for animals, established extinction as a fact, discovered the mastodon, deduced that the prehistoric world had been dominated by reptiles and not mammals, and strongly opposed evolution (believing that there were cyclical creations and destructions of life forms by extinction events such as deluges). He died during the 1832 cholera outbreak in Paris.